Page 15 of How We Play the Game
So that’s taken care of. I could have really used the transport, though. Without it, I have to leap from rooftop to rooftop, with each bound exposing me to fire from unseen enemies. I check the player count—we’re down to seven, and when I land in the plaza, I do so on top of someone else, smooshing them with my superhero-landing stomp.
Immediately, I take a laser blast in the shoulder and see my health dip down a few notches. Damn it, it’s over. They have the high ground. I don’t have any defense glyphs to protect myself from another shot, so I’m going to have to avoid dying the hard way. I dash toward cover, use the water spouting from the plaza’s central fountain to send myself shooting up into the air, and use my laser gun’s special attack to shearthe health away from whoever is bad enough to have his head poking up from behind his cover. Three players left now. One more kill will put me in the top two, but this isn’t Wizzcon and a top two doesn’t mean anything until the end of the summer.
Some tussle across the plaza takes out number three. Now it’s me and the chunky silhouette of a special edition player avatar. I don’t need more detail to identify CASS—he plays as a dinosaur in a chicken costume. A quick speed boost sends me rocketing across the plaza toward the last place he dove, my lasers ready to take him down with a forehead shot when I hear thecrackof player-generated lightning. I backflip out of the way of Cass’s spell cast, thinking briefly of Ivan’s quick evade from earlier, and load the explosive arrow into my bow.
The arrow, thicker and easier to follow than the thin laser types the bow usually fires, arcs gracefully across the sky and lands directly behind Cass’s cover. Theboomis satisfying. The messageBATTLE WIN: ZORAis even more satisfying. If there’s one thing that might make up for my reaction to the cameras, it’s a first place win.How’s that for a rematch, bro?
When I wrench my headphones off, I shudder with relief when the individualized attention gives way to the relative anonymity of being one in forty-nine players onstage. Somehow the racket of people emerging from the game in real life is less overwhelming than having their conversations float in and out of my ears against my will.
“That was brutal.” Hearing Ivan’s voice next to me as opposed to projected directly into my ear confuses my brain, and it takes a moment for me to orient myself toward the actual source of his voice.
“For real,” Kavi adds, beads of sweat visible around her hairline. “What a match.”
“Not the match,” Ivan says. “Zorawas brutal.”
Excuse me, sir. This isn’tGuardians League Tea and Crumpets. It’sGuardians League Royale, battle implied. Brutal is the name of the game, literally. Metaphorically. I’m not sure which one I mean, to be honest.
“Does anyone know what happens now?” Trieu asks. “I thought there’d be some kind of, I dunno, confetti cannon? Champagne? Something to mark the end of our first match?”
“I don’t think we’re that bougie,” I offer. But Trieu has a point. The other players onstage are all out of the game now, headphones already hung around their necks or on their desks, but there’s radio silence from the theater’s front row of seats, which is where Brian retreated once the game began. And now he’s not alone.
The camera guys are crowded around him, each one holding their device down as they appear to be scrubbing back and forth to find a specific moment. Before I can ask myself what they’re all looking for, I hear it.
“I said FUCK OFF!” plays from one tinny camera speaker.
That gets my attention. And Ivan’s. And everyone else who’s close enough to the front row to hear it.
From another camera, fainter but still audible in the background of their footage, “—said FUCK OFF!”
“OFF!”
“I said—”
“FUCK—”
So, it’s possible I didn’t “all but shout” that particular phrase. I may have truly, loudly, and with astonishing powersof vocal projection screamed that particular phrase at a volume high enough for everyone’s microphones to pick up my voice.
Kavi looks at me, a hint of panic in her eyes.
“Zora, you didn’t.”
For the first time since emerging from the game, I peer over at Ivan. He looks relaxed as ever, slouching low in his chair with that smirk on his face.
“Oh, yes she did.”
Come on, it was one curse word. One of the stronger ones, but still.
“Grow up,” I snap at Ivan. “I shot a unicorn in the butt and landed so hard on a guy he exploded, but the f-word is a bridge too far?”
“Unironically, yes,” Trieu says.
“But why?” I ask. It doesn’t take long to find my answer. Every eye follows Brian as he rises from his seat and glides toward my desk, the long lines of his purple suit accentuating each click of his heeled black boots against the stage. This is how I meet my hero.
“You are Zora Lyon?” Brian asks with a glance down at the tablet in his hand. He pronounces my last name like the city in France, which I hoped one day he’d do just so I could correct him with a joke about actual lions, which would make him laugh, which would make him remember me forever and support my dreams like a Canadian fairy godfather. This does not happen.
“I am,” I say instead. Up close Brian looks, and it may just be the circumstances, more intimidating than his wholesome image might betray. He has blue eyes, unusually bright against his tanned face, and right now they are staring at meso incisively I half expect him to start communicating telepathically. I thought he’d look younger, and I suddenly realize my error: the version of Brian Juno in my head is actually a combination of the many Brians I’ve watched in Wizzard Games creative interviews going back almost two decades.
I’ve seen what he looked like ten years ago followed by what he looked like in his twenties, clicking through to the well-lit, cheery face he wore to accept Wizzard’s trophy at last year’s Game Awards, and on and on with each video I cued up. All out of order. But time doesn’t work like that. It just goes forward, and the twenty-year-old Brian I’ve imagined as my bestie only exists as a memory inside the fortysomething-year-old man directing a deeply furrowedMax Paynesquint at the seventeen-year-old me sitting in front of him.
